If enough people left their party, and their electoral shenanigans (gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc) didn’t work anymore, the GOP would be forced to adopt positions that the Democrats have, in order to try and win back voters.
Well, either they’d modify it, or another party would come up to take their place as a viable, not-insane, center-right party. History is full of parties who have lost their way and been replaced by new up-and-comers. The Republican Party itself was born from the collapse of the Whig party, with mostly abolitionist Whigs joining the new party and the various whackjobs whose views were actually not too dissimilar from the modern day GOP often joining the Know Nothing Party, which was quickly marginalized and cease to exist.
A lot of never-Trump Republicans, the type who are like, “I may be a Republican, but I’m never voting for this party again while they continue to support the orange dotard,” are honestly hoping either for a reformation or, barring that, a split where they can join a reasonable center-right party.
Unfortunately, these types of reasonable Republicans seem to be the rarity. The vast majority seem to only care to “own the libs,” as I stated earlier.
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My plausible ideal future. (Can’t talk about my true ideal communist utopia).
GOP splits into two parties:
- Fiscal conservatives (still evil, but not crazy)
- Crazies (minority party, mostly nazis)
Democrats remain a coalition party of the center-left, with an internal minority tea-party analogue that’s far Left.
Battles among the Left happen inside the Democratic primaries. Mainline Democrats compromise with Fiscies on issues where they lose the far-Left vote. Democrats ignore the Fiscies when they are unified with their internal far-Left faction.
The crazies just sit in congress being crazy and no one ever compromises with them.
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Yeah, I think Rym’s point is that if the GOP abandons any part of the plaftform, they become a fundamentally different party.
I’d like to believe this will happen, but I’m not totally convinced we aren’t seeing the permanent Republican majority.
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If you had told me two to three years ago, that the Republican Party would be pro-Russia, anti-FBI and DOJ, generally disparaging and distrustful of the Intelligence Community, wanted to blow up NAFTA and NATO, etc, I’d say you were crazy. And yet…
All those changes in the Republican Party happened within the last two years. As unlikely as it seems, I don’t find it impossible that they could embrace more radical change like being pro-LGBTQ+, etc.
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I can’t find it possible. All of those actions seem to be giving up whatever positions they hold that don’t align with their core values. What you’re talking about is having them give up one of their core values. And one that’s held by a large number of the people who consider themselves Republican.
The “importance of the traditional family,” with all of the bullshit patriarchal implications, is the center of the Republican party’s social platform. In that sense, Trump is the culmination of what the party’s been pushing towards for decades: big daddy businessman who thinks you need to just listen to him and everything will be fine.
Trump pushes against the free trade values of the apparatchiks of the party and finds push-back there. But there’s not the same resistance the further you go from them.
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A balanced budget and fiscal responsibility isn’t a CORE value of the Republican Party? I would argue that it is the absolute core of the GOP, yet they seem to have completely given that up in favor of nationalism.
Again, I’m not saying it’s likely, I’m just saying that in the face of prolonged electoral defeat and shifting demographics, the Republican Party might be forced to change in the future.
Hardly anyone in the party (elected or voting) ever cared about it. It was just an excuse to oppose social programs and always has been. They almost never opposed spending for military/police: only for Democratic initiatives or social programs.
What happened is the GOP realizing that many of their stated goals were never important to most of their constituents. They’ve now dropped even the pretense.
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That’s simply just not true. Hardly anyone in the GOP NOW cares about fiscal responsibility or a balanced budget, but that’s only a somewhat recent trend. Historically, Republicans have cared very much about those issues.
I don’t buy it. They’ve said that on paper, but in practice they clearly haven’t for decades. The base never cared either. Hence, when it was dropped none of them batted an eye.
Turns out it was racism and nativism all along. Everything else in the party was just a pretense for at least the last 30 years.
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Go back and read some articles from the 1980s, about Reagan’s budgets and tax proposals, as well as both Bush’s proposals, and you’ll see Republican opposition to some of their spending increases and the resulting deficit increase.
Yes, many Republican voters were really all about racism and nativism, but being fiscally conservative was the core of the Republican platform for decades.
Can you find something from before 1968? Because I think Nixon and the Southern Strategy irreparable damages your point. The party has always been pro-business, and that hasn’t changed in probably a century. The libertarian strain of thought combines the anti-social and pro-business aspects nicely, “Get out of my business and let my privately oppress people.”
The modern Republican Party didn’t exist before 1968, so why would that damage my point? Back then, you still had conservative Southern Democrats and more liberal Northern Republicans.
Not only does the GOP not care about standards anymore, but they’re party base doesn’t either. Many Republicans I’ve known are one-issue people coming down to religion, abortion, guns, or war. If you check off one box the democrats are against, you get the vote. Republicans will find new mental loop holes to assume Trump was good and fucked up by a “Deep State” no matter how hard he fucks up without their being actual physical damage on American Soil. (And even that can get denied) The only people who have actually admitted guilt from the GOP are people who have dropped the party and became democrats. All the posturing of “Well I’m still fiscal conservative so I support GOP” is bupkis since our cost of living keeps going up and the strength of the dollar keeps going down. The myth of the respectable Republican is so fucking false especially since Republicans have failed to do anything against people like McConnell or Paul Ryan or Graham.
Too many people are happy to sit with the hypocrisy and the “wreck the lives of people I don’t understand” policies of Republicans and the taste is fucking disgusting. Some even do it cause they refuse to think or engage in politics and think it’s pointless to care about things. Tired of that.
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Because the essence of what the party became IS the Southern Strategy. Lee Atwater sums it up pretty simply, as long as something is perceived as being in the goal of racial resentment, they’re free to strip-mine the country.
Now maybe that’s where you’re probably right and I’m overgeneralizing. There are the culture warriors, and then there are the people who are looking to loot the corpse. Any true believers are mostly believers in that if the government is going to spend any money, it should go into their pocket. Or they are Objectivists, and should immediatly be disqualified from holding any position of power. Anywhere.
While I am in no way saying the’re good people, I would categorize William F. Buckley, George Will, Charles Murray, Yuval Levin, and even David Brock, as fiscal conservative intellectuals.
If Buckley, one of the “founding fathers” of modern conservative thought could see the current GOP, I’d imagine that he’d be horrified.
There’s a strain of racism that keeps seeming to run pretty deep even in these “reasonable” conservatives. Some of it may stem from motivated reasoning. They start from first principals of “The government should do less,” and can’t accept the ways that attitude makes things shit. And leads them to defending some pretty horrid positions.
Oh, no doubt that Buckley was a racist. But he still was an economic Conservative who believed in small government, a balanced budget, and was against Federal debt.
He was also a guy who would get in trollish debates with Gore Vidal on television. Not that far from our current landscape other than the fact that Trump has a limited vocabulary. Having a good budget is nowhere near as important to Republicans as winning and that’s the core of the story. Reagan and W. Bush alone have torpedoed the importance of punishing those who can damage the economy.
The big problem tends to be with the GOP at the national level and in red states. Blue state Republicans tend to be more of a libertarian, socially liberal and fiscally moderate-to-conservative stripe, but that only extends as far as state office. Once they get to national office, they almost always kowtow to the national party’s platform. I mean, Gov. Baker here in Mass has come out in favor of LGBTQ rights in at least a few cases, didn’t vote for Trump, and basically told Trump to fuck off when asked to provide National Guard troops to “defend” the border with Mexico. Mitt Romney basically invented Obamacare when he was governor of Massachusetts before taking a hard turn right when he had presidential ambitions. The party is mostly rotten at the core at the national level, but a side effect of that is that it needs to symbolically gutted at all levels to truly be reformed or, failing that, replaced by a sane party.
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